Latin

A few months back I went down a rabbit hole studying all the different ways to talk about swords and spears in the Old Testament (in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek). It was a fun research project but it touched upon a much more fundamental problem when talking about the Old Testament. Rather than write a long introduction to an already long survey, I let the draft languish.

This is that long introduction.

(Warning: much of what follows is a gross simplification of a complicated scholarly field. I know no shame and I’m not consulting sources from my old training.) Continue reading Septuagint

Highest Priest and true Pontifex, who offered Yourself to God the Father as a victim pure and immaculate on the altar of the cross for us wretched sinners, and who gave to us Your Flesh for eating and Your Blood for drinking, and who established that mystery in the power of Your Spirit, saying: Whensoever shall ye do this, ye shall do in memory of me (Luke 22:19). I beg through Your Precious Blood, the great price of our salvation, I beg through this marvelous and untellable charity with which You so deign to love us, wretched and unworthy, that You would wash us from our sins in Your Blood (Rev. 1:5), teach me Your unworthy servant, whom also among Your other gifts You have deigned to call to the priestly office, by no merits of my own but only by the deigning of Your mercy, teach me, I seek, through Your Holy Spirit to [tractare] such a mystery with that reverence and honor, with that devotion and fear which are necessary and fitting. Make me through Your grace ever to believe and to understand something of such great a mystery, to sense and firmly to hold it, to speak and to thank whatever is pleasing to You and what advantages for my soul. Let Your good Spirit enter into my heart, Who sounds there without sound, and without the crash of words speaks all truth of such mysteries; surely they are exceedingly profound, and hidden with a sacred veil. On account of Your great clemency grant to me to celebrate the solemnities of Masses with clean heart and pure mind. Free my heart from thoughts unclean and nefarious, vane and noxious. Fortify me with the pious and faithful guardianship and strongest tutelage of the blessed angels, that the enemies of all goods fall down in confusion. Through the power of so great a mystery, and through the hand of Your holy angel repel from me and from all You servants the most hardened spirit of pride and vainglory [he’s strangely transliterated instead of the Vulgate’s inanis gloria], envy and blasphemy, fornication and uncleanness, doubt and distrust. Let them be confounded who persecute us, let them perish who rejoice to destroy all things.

King of virgins, Lover of chastity, with the heavenly dew of Your blessing extinguish in my body the fomes of burning desire, that there remain in me the tenor of chastity of body and soul. Mortify in my members the goads of the flesh and all the libidinous commotions, and give to me true and perpetual chastity with the rest of Your gifts, which are pleasing to You in truth, that a sacrifice of praise with chaste body and clean heart daily I may be hale to offer to You. For with how much contrition of heart and font of tears, how much reverence and tremor, how much chastity of body and purity of soul is that divine and heavenly sacrifice to be celebrated, Lord, where Your flesh is in truth consumed, where Your Blood in truth drunk, where the lowest is to the highest conjoined, where the presence of the holy angels attends, where You are sacrifice and priest marvelously and ineffably?

Who can worthily celebrate this, unless You, God Omnipotent, make the one offering worthy? I know, Lord, and truly know, and the self-same to Your goodness confess that I am not worthy to approach to so great a mystery on account of my exceeding sins and my infinite negligences.

But I know, and truthfully believe from my whole heart, I confess with my mouth, that You are able to make me worthy, who alone can make clean conception from unclean seed (Job 14:4); You alone make worthy from unworthy, clean from unclean, and just and holy from sinners. Through this Your omnipotence I beg You, grant to me a sinner to celebrate this heavenly sacrifice with fear and trembling, with purity of heart and font of tears, with spiritual happiness and heavenly joy. Let my mind sense the sweetness of Your blessed presence and the watchfulness of Your saints around me.

For mindful of Your venerable passion I approach to Your altar, a forborn sinner, that I may offer to You the sacrifice which You have instituted and commanded to be offered in commemoration of You for our salvation (Luke 22:19). To undertake it then, I seek, Higheste God, for Your Holy Church and for the people whom You have acquired by Your Blood. And since You have willed that I a sinner be medium between You and Your people, permit that You be not unaware of some testimony of good work in me, that at least You not reject the office of credited dispensation, nor through unworthy me should the price of their salvation perish, for whom, become the Victim of Salvation, You deigned to be Redemption. I offer therefore, Lord (if You will deign to look on graciously), the tribulations of commoners, the dangers of peoples, the weepings of captives, the miseries of orphans, the needs of pilgrims, the poverty of the weak, the desperations of the fainting, the defects of the old, the sighs of the young, the prayers of virgins, the laments of widows.

For You have mercy on all, Lord, and You hate nothing of the things which You have made (Wisdom 11:24-25). Remember what is our substance, for You are our Father, for You are our God; be not wrathful to the full, nor hold over us the multitude of your bowels. For not in our justifications do we prostrate our prayers before Your face, but in Your many mercies. Bear away from us, Lord, our iniquities, and the fire of the Holy Spirit in us clemently ignite. Bear away the heart of stone from our flesh and give to us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19), which fears You, loves You, loves You, delights in You, follows You, thoroughly enjoys You. We pray, Lord, for Your clemency that with serene face You deign to look upon Your family awaiting the offices of Your sacred Name, and that no one’s prayer be void, no one’s postulation be empty, that You suggest to us the prayers which You Yourself delight to hear and hear propitiously.

We beseech You also, Holy Father, also for the souls of the faithful departed, that You be for them salvation, health, joy, and refreshment, this great Sacrament of Piety. My God, let there be for them daily a great and full banquet:

from You, the Living Bread, Who hath descended from heaven and do give life to the world (John 6:33),

from Your holy and blessed flesh, that is, of the spotless Lamb which takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), which from the holy and glorious womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed, and conceived from the Holy Spirit,

from that font of piety, I say, [which] flowed through the lance of the soldier from Your most sacred side,

in order that, repaired and satiated, refreshed and consoled, they may rejoice in Your praise and glory. I petition Thy clemency, O God, that it may descend upon [it–that banquet? the altar?], the fullness of your blessing, and the sanctification of Your divinity. Let it descend also, O Lord, that invisible and incomprehensible majesty of Your Holy Spirit, just as once it descended on the host of fathers, that it may make Your Body and Blood our oblations, and may teach me, unworthy priest, to so conduct the mystery with purity of heart and devotion of tears, with reverence and trembling, so that pleasedly and benignly may You receive the sacrifice from my hands unto the salvation of all both living and deceased alike.

I ask You, O Lord, through this sacrosanct mystery of Your Body and Blood, by which daily in Your Church we are fed and watered, washed and sanctified, as well as made partakers of the one and highest divinity, give to me Your holy virtues, by which replete with good conscience I may accede to Your altar, so that this heavenly sacrament may cause for me salvation and life. You Yourself have said with Your holy and blessed mouth: “The bread which I shall give is My flesh for the life of the world. If any eat of this bread, he shall live unto eternity” (John 6:52). O Sweetest Bread, heal the palate of my heart, that I may sense the gentleness of Your love. Heal it from every faintness that it may sense no sweetness before You, may seek no love before You, may love no beauty before You. O Most Radiant Bread, having all sweetness and all savor of suavity (Wisdom 16:20), You who ever repair us, and never do You fail in Yourself, may my heart consume You, and by the sweetness of Your savor may the bowels of my soul be filled. The angel feeds on You with a full mouth, let pilgrim man feed on You after his own fashion, lest it be possible to fail on such a road although recreated by viaticum. O Holy Bread, Living Bread, Beautiful Bread, Pure Bread Who has descended from heaven and gives life to the world, come into my heart and purify me from every defilement of flesh and spirit (II Cor 7:1), enter into my soul and sanctify me inwardly and outwardly. Be safety and continual health of (for) my soul and my body. Repel from me the enemies lying in wait for me; let them fall back afar from the presence of Your power so that within and without through You fortified by the right path to Your reign I may arrive, where not in mysteries–as is done in this time–but face to face will I see You (I Cor 13:12), when You will hand over the Kingdom to God and the Father (I Cor. 15:24), and God will be all in all (I Cor 15:28). Then indeed shall You satisfy me of Yourself with a marvelous satiety, so that I shall neither hunger nor thirst into eternity.

[Somehow wordpress swallowed this post back in February and never published it.]

I’ve started digging around in the scholarly lit on the authorship of the prayers of St. Anselm. While JP Migne records 72 prayers (it’s his numbering that I have been using when I post translations), things apparently stand quite a bit leaner than that. It’s “well known” that many are composed by another Benedictine abbot from the same era, John of Fecamp. Still others seem to be the work of yet other hands. My English translation prepared by Benedicta Ward only gives 19 prayers to St. Anselm, which she bases on the critical edition prepared by Dom Schmitt.

Sadly, her introduction does not go into any of the text criticism. Why these nineteen? What are the marks of authenticity? Who wrote all those other prayers? Are there degrees of uncertainty or have we successfully identified the authors of all the other prayers?

I write sadly because no one else has gone into that detail either—not in English, anyway. Her introduction would have been an excellent place to centralize that information. Southern’s magisterial biography doesn’t either. So, irritated and wanting to know how the questions stood, I went to Schmitt. No-brainer, right?

Schmitt’s five-volume work doesn’t give the reasoning either! Instead, there is the apologetic note that the grandfather of this field of study, Dom Andrea Wilmart, had been the intended preparer of the critical edition of the prayers. Wilmart having sadly died before he could complete the work, Schmitt finished his manuscript. Neither volume one nor volume three give any of the reasoning behind the exclusions. Continue reading Lost Scholarship

Verb, root meaning to become firm or rigid, means something like “to be paralyzed with fear” or “to dread.”

Noun form is this dread, dread of an extreme intensity, and very often associated with the fear we properly have of the divine, the transcendent, God and his angels and the demons. What we feel when Jove hurls his lightning or we climb the mountain to stand in the presence of Apollo.

But a fun twist: formido is also a hunter’s gauge or bogy set up to frighten prey, to flush it toward the hunter or the net. And so the formido is also an object that causes formido.

You can cross up these meanings. St. Anselm/John of Fecamp uses it to describe the service of the priesthood–a great formido!–and the fear of contaminating the sacrament of the altar.

It is of course where we get the English word formidable, but “daunting” or “imposing” is not intense enough for how the word stands in Latin. “Utterly petrifying” is better.

How is the priesthood “utterly petrifying?” Anselm/John has the priest trapped by a fear that either reaction is to his doom. Dare I approach the altar of God despite being so unworthy? Do you know what happens to those who defile the sacraments?! But then again, do you know what happens to those who disobey the commandments of God?! Why have I been placed in this untenable position? What do I do? Is my service to my destruction or my salvation?

I’ve been using Douay-Rheims Bible Online (www.drbo.org) as my source for this little Vulgate project. Just happened to stand at the head of Google’s list of a “psalms vulgate” search. When you need a quick Septuagint check, just head over to www.newadvent.org

“Ad te, Domine, levavi” (Psalm 24)

[1] In finem. Psalmus David. Ad te, Domine, levavi animam meam.

Unto the end. A Psalm of David. To You, O Lord, I have lifted up my soul.

First of the Sabbath. A Psalm of David. The Lord’s is the earth, and its fullness; the orb of lands, and all who dwell in it.

For He above the seas has founded it, and above the rivers prepared it.

Who shall ascend unto the mountain of the Lord? Or who shall stand in His holy place?

Innocent in hands and clean heart, who has not accepted in vane his own soul, nor sworn in deceit to his neighbor.

This one shall accept blessing from the Lord, and mercy from the God of his salvation.

This is the generation those seeking Him, of those seeking the face of the God of Jacob.

Lift up the gates, you princes, yours, and be elevated, eternal gates, and he shall enter, the king of glory.

Who is this, the king of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.

Lift up the gates, you princes, yours, and be elevated, eternal gates, and he shall enter, the king of glory.

Who is this, the king of glory? The Lord of virtues, He Himself is the king of glory.

==

I hate the verb praeparo. Paro means prepare. Praeparo means pre-prepare…? Nah, just prepare. But like, really fast. Actually, I guess I just hate English for using praeparo to translate paro… Those Anglo-Saxons did some weird stuff.

Super-famous, super-short, and super-cool that it follows on the heels of Psalm 21. Of course most people know this one, or the opening line at least, under the title of Psalm 23. The Latin doesn’t shake out quite the same but you can still hear all the echoes:

Famously quoted during Christ’s Passion, and fittingly translated (though not posted) during Holy Week. Nowhere else is it more obvious that the psalms are the script and soundtrack of Christ’s life. Go all out on the typology when you read this: by the end we’ll be singing about the Church, the communion of saints, and the Eucharist!